"Live footage showed a team pull out a 1.5-metre-long (five-foot-long) rock from the lake after first wrapping it in a special covering and placing it on a metal sheet while it was still underwater.

"The fragment was then pulled ashore and placed on top of a scale for weighing, an operation that quickly went wrong.

"The rock broke up into at least three large pieces as it was lifted from the ground with the help of levers and ropes.

"Then the scale itself broke, the moment it hit the 570kg (1,255lb) mark."

It may take awhile for the rock to be certified as coming from space, but the curator of meteorites at London's Natural History Museum tells the BBC the rock has all the markings of a meteorite.

RIA Novosti, the official state news agency of Russia, quotes Viktor Grokhovsky, a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences' meteorite commission, which examined other fragments, as saying: "It's a typical meteorite, judging by its appearance — [I'm] 105 percent [sure]. There's no doubt about that, [it has] a thick melted crust, while dents reveal typical structures of the Chelyabinsk meteorite."